Services

We offer customized consulting services for the hotel and hospitality industry, including:

• Sales and marketing consulting
• Revenue management consulting
• Training and staff development consulting
• Speaking, training, and facilitating

We can work with all types of properties, at all stages of growth or decline, including our specialty areas. We’ve advised hotel owners, hotel operators, and hotel developers throughout the United States on all aspects of hotel management.

Because every property is different, our consulting approach is always different. We create custom solutions based on your needs, your goals, your assets, your market, and your location.

Hiring a hotel consultant can be extremely beneficial when:

• You need a quick fix
• You’re not sure whether your team is performing at the highest level
• You need to immediately fill a vital position
• The strategies you’ve tried aren’t working
• You’re in a transition stage

In many cases, hiring a consultant is less expensive than continuing to make costly mistakes and/or the commitment to payroll and benefits expenses for multiple employees.

Scroll down for more details about what we can provide our clients.

Specialty Areas

With more than 30 years experience in the hotel and hospitality industry, we offer a complete range of consulting services, including sales and marketing consulting and revenue management consulting for hotels at all different stages of growth and development.

Sales and Marketing

Our sales and marketing consulting services extend to all aspects of the hotel and hospitality industry, including:  large chain hotels, small chain hotels, franchise hotels, independent hotels, boutique hotels, condo hotels, center-city hotels, conference centers, timeshares, beach resorts, golf resorts, ski resorts, spa resorts, water park resort, bed and breakfasts.

We offer a range of hotel and hospitality sales and marketing consulting services for all types of properties.

Revenue and Profit Optimization

Hotel management can be challenging in today’s ever-changing environment. To excel, you need to monitor not only revenue, but also profit. If all of your departments and team members aren’t working together – toward the same common goals, your hotel’s performance will undoubtedly suffer.

If you’d like an expert to cast a fresh eye on your operations and make recommendations for improvements (for both short-term impact and long-term gains), we’d love to work with you.

Our areas of specialty include:

• inventory management and distribution
• segment strategy and market mix
• pricing and value-added packaging
• displacement and denial analysis
• measurement (including the use of third-party tools)
• ancillary services (food and beverage, retail outlets, online sales of merchandise, and packages that include local activities and/or transportation)
• staff training and development

On all of our consulting projects, we offer the option of private label representation, in which we position ourselves as a valuable part of your management team.

Pre-Opening Consulting

The months (and sometimes even years) before a new hotel opens can be critical, often setting the tone for success or failure.

We have experience in all phases of pre-opening, including:

• feasibility studies
• research and development
• initial business plan
• pre-staffing
• pricing
• initial set up of property in all distribution channels and inventory load up
• implementation of technology (including verification that it all works together)
• marketing plan
• Social media, mobile strategies, and Internet marketing (including setting up a website, optimizing it for search engines, and linking it with all of the directories)

Hiring a hotel consultant can be a cost-effective way to address pre-opening needs. With more than 30 years experience in the hotel and hospitality industry, we have the skills and expertise to serve as a “generalist,” covering many specialty areas at once.  By choosing Amanda J. Dennis & Associates, you can avoid the need to hire someone eighteen months or more in advance of opening, when you might not even be sure what you’ll require.

With a wide range of experience, and a laser-like ability to focus on what needs to be done and when, we can help ensure that all of your pre-opening efforts lead to a successful, robust opening.

Critical Care Turnarounds

If you have a property that’s performing poorly, limping along, or producing below expectations, we can help turn it around…and quickly!

We start with an analysis and situation overview of the hotel, in order to determine why the performance is suffering. Is it a market positioning issue, a depressed market, a pricing model problem, an ineffective staff, a flawed market mix, low occupancy, a miscalculation in the way staff is deployed, an improper distribution of inventory, or a combination of these and the hundreds of other factors that can influence the bottom line?

We’ll quickly determine the causes and effects of poor performance and come up with recommendations that can be implemented across the board.

As part of our turnaround consulting services, we can:

• develop a marketing plan that balances traditional marketing strategies with Internet marketing, social media, and mobile strategies
• devise a revenue management plan that emphasizes profitability, as well as revenue growth
• evaluate pricing, inventory management, and distribution channels
• improve your call center
• train, develop, and mentor staff

White Label Services

We have more than 30 years experience in the hotel and hospitality industry, including advisory and consulting projects for some of the largest and most prestigious companies in the world.

If you’d like to contract with us – under a retainer agreement – and publicize Amanda Dennis as your sales and marketing contact, we’d be happy to make that arrangement.

There are several benefits to hiring a hotel consultant, instead of a high-paid, salaried employee, including:

• you’ll receive just as much (or more) value, without having to make a long-term commitment to salary and benefits;
• you can use a hotel consultant as a stop-gap measure until you’re more certain that business is coming back and/or continuing to grow at a sustainable rate.

Amanda Dennis isn’t like most hotel and hospitality consultants who prefer to come in, tell you what to do, and leave. Instead, she enjoys being part of the team, getting to know the hotel and staff, working side by side with managers, and teaching teams how to market and sell effectively.

Digital Marketing and e-Commerce

The possibilities for marketing on the Internet are changing rapidly, almost on a daily basis. If you don’t want to get left behind – holding empty hotel rooms that could have been sold online – you need to be well-versed in:

• online distribution channels
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• e-commerce
• mobile strategies (that are changing daily to adapt to smart phones and PDAs)
• online reviews
• brand reputation management
• social media marketing and communication (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and social bookmarking sites)
• pay-per-click
• e-newsletters

With everything else you have to do, staying on top of the emerging technologies and keeping your information up-to-date is virtually impossible. At Amanda J. Dennis & Associates, we’ve assembled a team of experts who specialize in the different Internet marketing disciplines, and we can design a marketing plan for your hotel that capitalizes on the power of consistent online marketing.